Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

October 28, 2012

Thick Skin Thinking: How To Use Negative Feedback To Your Advantage At Work

“If you are of the belief that you never make mistakes, you probably have a narcissistic personality disorder, and it’s going to be really hard to give you feedback. Somebody who has enough self-awareness to recognize they might need feedback, that’s the person that’s going to say ‘Even when I’m on my best game, there’s always something I could’ve done to be better.’”

Configuring Database Mail in SQL Server
This is an enterprise solution for sending mails from the SQL Server database engine to SMTP servers. SQL Server database applications can communicate with users through an email system. It provides features like scalability, security, and reliability.

The Silent Killer of Big Companies
Most leaders today recognize how dangerous it can be to take a lax approach to people management. But how many leaders appreciate the risks that come with taking a lax approach to communication management — with failing to manage the way that ideas and information flows within their organization?

7 reasons why Windows RT works
But fear not: Just because Redmond doesn't want you calling it Windows 8 Lite doesn't mean it doesn't have redeemable qualities. Windows RT and the devices that run it offer some excellent, interesting innovations. Here are our top six:

BizTalk ESB Exception Handling – Consuming WCF Services – Part I
Another interesting fact I bumped into when calling a WCF service from an itinerary is that, when the WCF adapter raises an exception, the receive pipeline of the send port does not execute. The first time I saw this was when trying to authenticate a service request when the target service refused my credentials.

CIOs Talk About How Social Networking Builds Enterprise Collaboration
Over the last five years or so, more organizations have used social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to communicate with customers. Now many organizations are taking a cue from those sites to deploy more socially minded communication and collaboration tools. Does taking a more social, collaborative approach work?

Why the New Oracle ADF Essentials is Important to JSF Developers

These news should be very interesting to developers who are currently using JSF to build their applications, as Oracle ADF Essentials is offering some unique capabilities and extensions around JSF. Here are some of the things JSF developers should know about ADF Essentials:

Data quality process needs all hands on deck
“More and more businesses need to invest resources for quality, useful information,” said Lyn Robison, another Gartner analyst. “A business that can’t produce useful information is like an airplane that can’t fly. How useful is that? Not very.”

Enterprise architecture methodology
It is hard to know which one is best EA methodology. Each kind has advantages and disadvantages, so choosing what kind of them is depending on each organization. There are twelve criteria that are most often used for comparing and evaluating enterprise-architectural methodologies.

IT, business executives don't see eye to eye on innovation: survey
"IT respondents are more likely to position themselves as driving innovation, being an expert on innovation and having the required skills to foster innovation," the report states. "Yet, business executives more quickly identified IT’s shortcomings in regard to its ability to support and drive innovation. In fact, business executives are less likely to highly rate IT’s knowledge of the business, skill sets, communication skills and more."

Quotes for the day:

"One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested." —-- E. M. Forster

"One measure of leadership is the caliber of people who choose to follow you." -- Dennis A. Peer

October 27, 2012

Reducing Uncertainty in the Financial Evaluation of Technology Projects
It's not uncommon for new technology projects to have little short-term impact, while having a significant effect on long-term strategic goals. Due to the discounting of these long-term benefits, they become less significant in an economic evaluation. For example, how could Apple have known the future value of the iPad when it was in development? This uncertainty poses a major problem to funding projects that don't support current product lines or markets.

Amazon Outage, Complexity and Interdependence
Throughout the day, Amazon had availability, performance and connectivity issues with most services on one of their datacenters or, as they call them, availability zones. While some people may still take this opportunity to declaim the dangers and issues with cloud computing, it should be a well-known fact that cloud services suffer failures and outages.

Microsoft starts $40 Windows 8 upgrade sales
Microsoft will sell the Windows 8 Pro upgrade at the discounted price until Jan. 31, 2013. It's not entirely clear what the price will be after the offer expires, but several online retailers selling the $69.99 boxed copy show that price as marked down from a regular price of $199.99.

It's happening: Hadoop and SQL worlds are converging
The common thread of announcements is essentially, “We know that Hadoop is not known for performance, but we’re getting better at it, and we’re going to make it look more like SQL.” In essence, Hadoop and SQL worlds are converging, and you’re going to be able to perform interactive BI analytics on it.

Can Business Embed IT?
Organizations and their IT departments are struggling to keep pace with evolving business environments that have now added social, mobile, cloud and analytic forces to the competitive toolset. At Forrester Research’s latest Orlando conference, Kyle McNabb, VP and practice leader for application development and delivery, sat down to discuss how business outcomes – not technology – will prescribe the structures and tactics of IT support going forward.

The High Costs of Securing Identities: How to Fix the Problem Using the Cloud
The cloud serves as that mechanism to enable configuring as opposed to programmer-driven customization to provide each and every industry with a predictable cost, a predictable path (with a real light at the end of the tunnel!) and a predictable result for solving identity management problems.

Does the Rise of the CMO Threaten CIOs?
"Ten years ago, marketing was always at the bottom of IT's to-do list," says Kristin Hambelton, vice president of Marketing for Neolane , a marketing technology provider. "IT wasn't discriminating against marketing, but IT usually has five or 10 projects going at any one time, and marketing was always at the bottom of the list." As a result, marketing pros got tired of waiting and sidestepped IT.

Leadership Development - Effectively Influencing Decision Makers
The 11 guidelines listed below are intended to help you do a better job of influencing decision-makers. In some cases, these decision-makers may be immediate or upper managers—in other cases they may be peers or cross-organizational colleagues.

Google should worry less about iOS and more about Windows 8 tablets
Have you used a Windows 8 tablet yet? If Google wants enterprise traction for Android, it has more to learn from these devices than it does from iPhones and iPads.

Quotes for the day:

"A real leader faces the music, even when he doesn't like the tune." -- Author Unknown

"Success comes from knowing that you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming" -- John Wooden

October 26, 2012

Windows 8: Four big takeaways for business and IT
Yes, this is even bigger than the launch of Windows 95. Why? Because Microsoft is completely rewriting the idea of what it means to use a computer. The old file and folder metaphor is gone. The visual image of a desktop workspace is history (except for legacy apps).

Facebook Releases New Android SDK
Facebook announced Facebook SDK 3.0 Beta for Android in a blog posting this week. Facebook's Michael Marucheck calls it the biggest update ever for Android developers. The major change is in the area of native UI controls.

IBM Voices Support for PaaS at Cloud Forum
IBM spent much of the one-day event, attended by 100 customers and 200 other stakeholders including business partners, talking up PaaS. The company's PaaS offering, called SmartCloud Application Services (SCAS), is available in pre-release form for customers of IBM's existing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering, SmartCloud Enterprise (SCE) and it will be generally available later this quarter.

Introducing TDD With The Microsoft Fakes Framework
The big issue with TDD for most developers is, I think, the database. If your tests are driven by your data, and your data keeps changing, how do you to ensure that you get the "right" answer in your automated tests? However, that's just one example of a larger problem: If the code you're testing is dependent on something else, and that something else keep changing, how do you ensure that your test results stay constant?

Delivering Large-Scale IT Projects On Time, On Budget, and On Value
Half of all large IT projects—defined as those with initial price tags exceeding $15 million—massively blow their budgets. On average, large IT projects run 45 percent over budget and 7 percent over time, while delivering 56 percent less value than predicted. Software projects run the highest risk of cost and schedule overruns

There’s No Data Security ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ Card
Maintaining data security is no longer a when-you-get-to-it project. It’s a critical step that needs to be undertaken now, particularly as the government is formulating a final rule that toughens privacy. That was the take-home message from a session on data privacy at the Medical Group Management Association annual convention, in San Antonio.

A CEO takes on the war for talent
NetSuite's chief people officer, Marty Réaume, says he started using a talent-assessment tool called TriMetrix after executives noticed that many new hires were quitting after less than a year, Jessi Hempel writes. Also, the company's CEO, Zach Nelson, began reviewing every potential hire, a strategy that he says motivates recruiters to find better candidates.

5 Hybrid Cloud Use Cases

Along with its private and public siblings, hybrid cloud computing has garnered quite a bit of business interest and proclamations by analysts of rampant growth over the next few years. Technical and security concerns aside, how does this option for cloud deployment fit in the enterprise IT toolkit? And where would it work for business users? Here are five examples where a hybrid cloud model may hold a particular competitive or operational advantage.

Microsoft Releases Hadoop On Windows
HDInsight Server for Windows includes core Hadoop (meaning the Hadoop Distributed File System and MapReduce), plus Pig for MapReduce programming, Hive data query infrastructure, Hortonworks' recently introduced HCatalog table management service for access to Hadoop data, Scoop for data movement, and the Ambari monitoring and management console.

Interview: Steve Howard, COO of Sustainability, IKEA
At yesterday’s BSR conference in New York, I had the privilege of sitting down with Steve Howard, IKEA’s COO of Sustainability to talk about IKEA’s take on sustainability and their new sustainability strategy, known as “People and Planet Positive”.

Will the cloud be the end of the IT department?
Cloud apps are, in a sense, even more problematic. With whom does responsibility for the environment reside? What happens if a user accidentally deletes important data or a user account gets broken into? Proper management of passwords, backup policies, access control strategies, and other issues is even more important.

Quotes for the day:

"Never tell me the sky's the limit when there are footprints on the moon." -- Anonymous

"Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions. This is a dangerous mistake." -- Peter Drucker

October 25, 2012

Managing "BYO" PCs in the enterprise (including WOA)
This post focuses on managing WOA PCs, which are designed with this "consumerization of IT" in mind. Since WOA PCs only support third-party code through the Windows Store and WinRT-based applications, we set out to develop industry-leading management capabilities that support BYO or company-deployed WOA PCs.

What Are They Doing with Big Data Technology?
Clearly, much of the buzz has centered on the open source tools collectively referred to as Hadoop, and my starting point is a review of the self-reported descriptions of those organizations that are using Hadoop. Conveniently, the Apache Software Foundation provides a wiki website entitled “Powered By Hadoop,” in which organizations report what they are doing.

Enhanced Memory Protections in IE10
While socially-engineered malware is the primary way that bad guys get their code onto victims’ computers, that is largely because browser vulnerabilities have become less common and harder to exploit over the last few years. However, as more and more users upgrade to IE9 and benefit from the protection provided by SmartScreen Filter, bad guys have a renewed interest in attacking the browser and its add-ons directly.

Are You Properly Addressing the Really Sticky Issues?
Change-related sticky issues center around certain topics, information, decisions, events, circumstances, etc. that have a bearing on the outcome of important initiatives, but clients are reluctant to discuss them. Instead of exploring causes, implications, potential responses, or resolution strategies, they prefer not to bring them up at all or to gloss over things in a casual, superficial manner.

Cloudera, MapR, Splunk update Hadoop tools
This week, Cloudera and MapR both announced that they are working on new features for their Hadoop distributions. And enterprise software vendors VMware and Splunk have announced products that should help the Apache Hadoop data processing platform work more easily with other IT systems.

Identity Crisis
As a project manager, we often find ourselves asking this very trifling question – “Am I a project manager attempting to assume the role of a subject matter expert or am I a subject matter expert trying very hard to be a project manager?” I hope you are not doing this every morning when you look at yourself in the mirror.

Enterprises, evaluate Windows 8 now (even if you won't use it)
Even if you're absolutely 100 percent sure that your business or enterprise isn't going to roll out the forthcoming Windows 8, at least give it a try, says one analyst.

3 Steps to Building Brand Loyalty
Brand loyalty is important to earn and hard to keep. I have my favorite brands but am always willing to try a new one. That doesn't mean I'm jumping ship, but I need to know what else is out there. I usually return to those brands that have gone beyond providing a product.

Who owns YOUR data?
Implementing an effective Master Data Governance solution can be tough…you have to deal with corporate culture, getting management support, formulation policies, implementing rules and much more. However, a less commonly addressed question is: “Who will own the governed data?”

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo fix serious email weakness
The weakness affects DKIM, or DomainKeys Identified Mail, a security system used by major email senders. DKIM wraps a cryptographic signature around an email that verifies the domain name through which the message was sent, which helps more easily filter out spoofed messages from legitimate ones.

Non-volatile memory's future is in software
Server, storage and application vendors are now working on new specifications to optimize the way their products interact with NVM, moves that could lead to the replacement of DRAM and hard drives alike for many applications, according to the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) technical working group.

Quote for the day:

"You have to think anyway, so why not think big?" -- Donald Trump

"You can't lead anyone else further than you have gone yourself." -- Gene Mauch

October 24, 2012

The New Meaning of Software Quality
Business needs to mine real time, quan
tifiable value from its quality processes to deliver better software faster, and "better" doesn't mean meeting users' requirements. It means meeting users' expectations. Bug counts don't matter. Uptime is keeping the company's doors open -- it just has to happen.

10 Critical IT Trends for the Next Five Years
Trying to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to IT issues is not a job for the faint of heart. That point was driven home at Gartner's IT annual IT Symposium fest here where analyst David Cappuccio outlined what he called 'new' forces that are not easily controlled by IT are pushing themselves to the forefront of IT spending.

Where IT Outsourcing is Headed
Over the next 12 months, organizations told that they need their IT departments to facilitate three critical goals: first, increase collaboration both internally and throughout the extended enterprise; second, enable operational efficiencies at all organizational levels and all departments; and finally, achieve a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

What .NET Developers Must Know about C++ Classes
C++ does things differently than C# or Visual Basic, especially when it comes to class construction. Take this tour to learn about the differences.

Surviving Digital Disruption
Asked if “shadow IT” is the new normal, Visitacion said it’s already the case and won’t be undone by a controlling IT attitude. “For most sectors you’re talking less about ‘build’ and more about ‘deploy.’

Go Ahead and Make Mistakes – But Not Really
As leaders, we say we want our people to be empowered and to go out and make decisions. We say we’re okay with them making mistakes and we’ll still support them making decisions on their own. But not really.

The Death of Creativity
Statistics suggests that productivity is steadily increasing in the working environment today, but this increase in productivity appears to be at the expense of creativity. In order for innovation to occur within business, there is a need for creative persons who are allowed the freedom to work in an environment that recognises the importance of their abilities. It appears that this requirement is gradually becoming extinct.

Don’t Build An Oil Tanker The problem is that as you build your large backend your site begins to operate more and more like an oil tanker, not a speedboat. When you rollout a product that is a speedboat, you can change directions as you learn more about which directions you want to sail.

The Complexity of Simplicity
A system is complicated if it is difficult to decompose in its constituent parts or if it is difficult to assemble. The complexity (complicatedness?) of a SINGLE object, named after Soviet Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, is a measure of the computational resources needed to specify the object.

Quote for the day:

"Management by objectives works if you first think through your objectives. Ninety percent of the time you haven't." -- Peter Drucker

October 23, 2012

HP offers new low-cost SaaS service desk
HP officials say its SaaS product includes new approaches to service desk management, including social media collaboration tools that are integrated into the problem solving processes. It is promising to shorten, overall, time to resolution of a problem.

Google for Entrepreneurs: Bringing ideas together
The Google for Entrepreneurs site features a strong focus on helping businesses get off the ground in parts of the world which are still developing or are women/minority led. For instance, Women 2.0 focuses on female entrepreneurs, Eleven is oriented for Eastern Europe and the Arab Developer Network Initiative is geared towards Palestinians

Intel strives to develop tiny chips to run wearable computers
"Potentially, it could have graphics built in," he said. "Right now, it's early in the game so we're looking at what makes sense to put in there. You'd want to have some memory built in and maybe some graphics, because you'd want to have one chip ... maybe two chips, but size-wise you want to keep it small."

Online clues suggest a Skype surprise for Windows 8 and Surface
In all of this week's news about Microsoft's Surface with Windows RT, one app has gone practically unmentioned. Will a "modern UI" version of Skype play a starring role at next week's Windows 8 launch event?

Big data to create 1.9M IT jobs in U.S. by 2015, says Gartner
Big data, which refers to data collected and analyzed from every imaginable source, is becoming an engine of job creation as businesses discover ways to turn data into revenue, says Gartner. By 2015, it is expected to create 4.4 million IT jobs globally, of which 1.9 million will be in the U.S.

Facebook could become an enterprise ID system
Gartner analyst Earl Perkins noted that identities on the Web may be managed by Facebook. In retail, Facebook may be the ID gatekeeper. Perkins said that there's a socialization of identities and by the end of 2015, 30 percent of all new retail customer IDs will be based on social media.

Near Field Communication slips, slowly, into the mainstream
“Because Apple did not use NFC in the iPhone 5, phone makers such as Samsung, Nokia, Motorola and others are all doing a harder push for NFC,” he says. Indeed, a raft of new NFC phones are hitting the U.S. market, in phones that run on the Android and Microsoft operating systems.

How Enterprise Architecture helps SAP turn strategy into action
In 2009, SAP established the Enterprise Architecture (EA) function as part of the internal IT organization, bringing senior architects under a single leadership. At that time, IT investments were very tactical, and the IT organization was seen more as an order taker rather than a strategic value enabler.

How Strategic Planning relates to Enterprise Architecture
Strategic Planning means different things to different people. The one constant is its reference to Business Planning which usually occurs annually in most companies. One of the activities of this exercise is the consideration of the portfolio of projects for the following financial year, also referred to as Project Portfolio Management (PPM).

How to Rationalize Your Application Portfolio
A majority of enterprises have hundreds of applications deployed on their network, but most tend to actively use far fewer than that. This application bloat is a significant and growing problem that costs many organizations millions of dollars a year. Here's how to combat the application sprawl.

Brother’s All-in-One Printer Is a Small Idea
It claims to be the world’s smallest-depth all-in-one printer, copier and fax machine. The machine is 7.3 inches tall, 11.4 inches deep and 18.9 inches wide, weighing in at 20.5 pounds.

Quote for the day:

"As a leader, you're probably not doing a good job unless your employees can do a good impression of you when you're not around." -- Lencioni

October 22, 2012

Forget Bring Your Own Device - Try COPE (Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled)
Plenty of IT departments see BYOD as a demon to be exorcised from the cubicle farms - or an opportunity to dump the responsibility for hardware upkeep on their internal customers. Rather than struggle with BYOD, some companies are turning the whole concept of BYOD on its head in favor of Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled (COPE) policies.

Enterprise sends Windows 8 to the grave before launch
Reuters reports that for a number of corporations, Windows 8 does not suit the enterprise market enough to warrant widespread adoption and movement away from Windows 7. Doug Johnson, head of risk management policy at the American Bankers Association, told the publication:

Microsoft hoping to lure VMware users with new migration tool
Microsoft's free Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC) tool is now available for download. The tool is used to convert virtual machines that today run on VMware products into a format compatible with Microsoft's own virtualisation environment, Hyper-V, the company said last week.

Few Takers for India's Auction of Mobile Spectrum
The Supreme Court ordered 122 licenses canceled in February, and the spectrum thus freed to be auctioned again, after it ruled that the allocation of licenses in 2008 had been manipulated by business interests. ... The lukewarm response to the auction can be put down to investors' concerns after the country's flip-flops on investment policy in a number of areas,

The Enterprise Architecture design has to begin with the whole rather than the parts
IT has currently have quite a few architecture diagrams. In fact, everybody seems to have a model in his drawer. But this is also the problem since these models don't add up to give the big picture. And they don't, since they were not produced to that purpose, but in isolation, with different tools, conventions, naming, scope and purpose in mind.

Slow Down to Speed up EA Results
As an EA, what is most important? Some will say one versus the other but I believe EA’s real value is to focus on the Speed to Value. We will always have edge cases where we do the Speed to Market. But using the 80/20 rule the real value for EA’s is through Speed to Value.

It’s time for robust data handling
In the age of big data, bring your own device (BYOD) and, yes, multiparty collaboration, there’s an increasingly massive amount of data that you can’t lock down behind the firewall. And if it’s going to be released into the ether anyway, then the safe approach is to turn to solutions that are completely focused on solving the challenges that current trends present.

SOLID design principles improve object-oriented development
SOLID is a set of five guiding principles that help developers design objects that are easy to maintain and use. Like many similar sets of principles in OO, SOLID is a guide not the goal. Let’s take a look at each of the five principles.

Big Data: Moving from strategy to tactics
Big Data, which comes into the enterprise unstructured and unorganized, first needs to be “prepped” so that it can be processed by a business analytics program. Here’s what you need to do.

Trend Micro's Q3 threat report: Mobile malware surged from 30K to 175K
Specifically, Trend Micro said that malware targeting Android increased nearly sixfold in Q3 2012 to approximately 175,000 malicious and "potentially dangerous" high-risk Android apps between July and September.

Quotes for the day:

"Never assume the obvious is true." -- William Safire

"One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency." -- Arnold Glasow

October 21, 2012

House and home compared with EITA and EA
A house is a ‘thing’, an assemblage of means – and on its own, ‘an empty thunder, signifying nothing’. A home is… something else… – a ‘something-between‘ that uses the ‘things’ of the house, or coalesces around or through the ‘things’ of the house, yet in itself is not of the house.

22 Ways to Dramatically Increase Your Influence
Some leaders are born; most are made. Long-term, powerful influence is never an accident; it’s always intentional. Experience and research indicates these 22 principles and behaviors dramatically increase leadership-influence.

Cloud Storage Specification Gets ISO Approval
The Cloud Data Management Interface has been approved as a standard by the International Organization for Standardization, clearing the path for adoption among vendors and government agencies alike.

Getting personal with diagnostics and data
One of the biggest challenges in accurate diagnosis is the availability of data. This may be information about the patient’s previous medical history, something that is increasingly available.

Viewpoint: Big data and big analytics means better business
Like the amount of data that organisations store, the value placed on data by firms has grown rapidly. According to new research by Dynamic Markets, for example, one in five of the UK's largest companies now quantify the value of corporate data on their balance sheets.

Kaspersky Lab Announces a Brand New OS Focused on Security
Accordingly, Kaspersky's goal is to build a secure operating system onto which ICS can be installed "and which could be built into the existing infrastructure--controlling 'healthy' existing systems and guaranteeing the receipt of reliable data reports on the systems' operation."

Using the MVVM Pattern in Windows 8
Windows 8 relies on a new set of APIs named the Windows Runtime (WinRT). There are three possible ways (sometimes called “projections”) to program applications running on the Windows Runtime.

Full stack HA in Hadoop 1: HBase’s Resilience to Namenode Failover
NameNode HA is finally available in the Hadoop 1 line. The test was done with Hadoop branch-1 and HBase-0.92.x on a cluster of roughly ten nodes. The aim was to try to keep a really busy HBase cluster up in the face of the cluster’s NameNode repeatedly going up and down. Note that, HBase would be functional during the time NameNode would be down.

Putting Global Cloud Standards on the Map
Worldwide implementations of cloud computing standards might not yet be a reality, but industry groups are making progress in areas such as security, interoperability, interfaces and inter-cloud infrastructure, according to an expert panel discussion held Tuesday, entitled “The State of Global Cloud Standards.”

Quote for the day:

"You get the best out of others when you get the best out of yourself." -- Harvey S. Firestone

October 20, 2012

Up to Date on Open Source Analytics
The good news for hackers like me is that there are so many freely-available, open source analytics products to choose from. The bad news is that it takes a focused effort to stay up to date on the latest largesse.

Patterns in Enterprise Software
In recent years there's been a small but useful growth in describing patterns for the development of enterprise systems. On this page Martin Fowler keep a list of the most notable catalogs on these patterns and some thoughts on the broad interrelationships between them.

Introducing Pastry - distrubuted hash table
Pastry, an implementation of the Pastry distributed hash table written entirely in Go is now open sourced. Second-bit only comfortable calling it an “alpha release” right now, so you may not want to run any mission-critical software on it just yet, but it’s ready to be kicked around a bit.

India, A New Facebook Testing Ground
The company sees the giant nation, whose Internet user base is expanding rapidly, as a market central to its future prospects. Since putting its first employee in India in 2010, Facebook has grown from eight million Indian users to 65 million as of this month, making it one of the company's top global markets.

Sneak Peek into Skybox Imaging’s Cloudera-powered Satellite System
Skybox is developing a low cost imaging satellite system and web-accessible big data processing platform that will capture video or images of any location on Earth within a couple of days. The low cost nature of the satellite opens the possibility of deploying tens of satellites which, when integrated together, have the potential to image any spot on Earth within an hour.

Transforming retail with the power of cloud
For Goodwin, moving to cloud was not, in itself, the goal; rather, he was drawn to the model by how well it would serve all of Hallmark’s stakeholders — through greater flexibility, scalability, cost-effectiveness and the ease with which new capabilities could be added.

Microsoft introduces iOS support to its mobile cloud services
Azure Mobile Services Platform will allow developers to store planned data in the cloud, incorporate it with user confirmation, and deliver updates to clients through push notifications Microsoft has added new features and enhanced support to its Azure Mobile Services Platform for Apple's iPhone and iPad.

What Determines Who You Are as a Leader?
It’s not possible to be a visionary leader if you do not have the ability to connect to the vision that lies within you, cultivate it, and share it with others. You cannot be a magnanimous leader if your heart does not hold generosity.

New Web Optimization Pre-Release Package on NuGet
WebGrease 1.3.0 was published to NuGet just a few days ago – 1.3.0 addresses several bugs found in the JavaScript and CSS minification process, so regardless of whether you choose to update Web optimization, make sure to update your WebGrease package.

MDM Hub Architecture Styles: Registry – Part 2
The Registry hub architecture stores the global, unique identifiers for each unique record, customer identifiers and various relevant metadata including transformation logic, constraints, list of values etc. In this architecture the MDM data hub does not store any physical data, but instead stores links to the records and data attributes in the source systems.

Quotes for the day:

"The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success." -- Bruce Feirstein

"People are persuaded by reason, but moved by emotion; the leader must both persuade them and move them." -- Richard M. Nixon

October 19, 2012

Computer Viruses Are "Rampant" on Medical Devices in Hospitals
While no injuries have been reported, the malware problem at hospitals is clearly rising nationwide, says Kevin Fu, a leading expert on medical-device security and a computer scientist at the University of Michigan and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who took part in the panel discussion.

Big Data Explorers Discover Integration, Business Support Pain Points
There are strong indications that many enterprises are looking to make the leap from big data exploration to execution, though many are still struggling with business use instances and integration underpinnings, according to a new global survey.

Enterprise Mobile Management: 5 Trouble Spots

There may be no trend changing the way we work more directly than enterprise mobility. Along with the benefits of having an agile workforce, there are unique disruptions regarding how to handle these new mobile extensions that are hitting business and tech leaders alike. Here are five areas you should pay special attention to when it comes to mobile device governance, device access to enterprise data and BYOD.

Cyberthieves steal $400,000 from Bank of America
Residents and city workers in Burlington, Wash., have been told to check their accounts after $400,000 was stolen from a city bank account. City officials believe that the security breach resulted from the infiltration of a government account used to pay workers in the town, which is about 65 miles north of Seattle.

A tour of DreamWorks Studios' data center
About 15% of DreamWorks' servers are virtualized, about 20% of their CG rendering is performed using cloud services, and the company has yet to find a need for solid state drives (SSDs), according to Mike Cutler, global director of Infrastructure Operations at DreamWorks Animation.

[IROS 2012] Iuro Robot Finds Its Way Through Cities, With Your Help
One of the most, uh, striking robots at the IROS expo this year was Iuro, with its giant and highly expressive blue and white plastic head. Iuro can approach humans and ask them for directions to help it navigate around cities while acting in a “socially acceptable manner,”

Flipkart Drives Innovation Through Intelligent use of IT
With the A/B component, Flipkart's engineers can also rapidly implement their ideas. "When someone proposes a new idea, a lot of precious time is spent debating what-if scenarios. Now, we can implement an idea, while mitigating its risks."

Fines for security breaches not viable in Asia
The introduction of fines by Asian regulators may not help to reduce the number of security breaches because regulatory compliance in the region is still not at a mature stage. It is also difficult for regulators to track security breaches and quantify the fines.

SOA Provides Needed Support for Enterprise Architecture in Cloud, Mobile, Big Data
The Open Group recently gathered an international panel of experts to explore the concept of “architecture is destiny,” especially when it comes to hybrid services delivery and management. The panel shows how SOA is proving instrumental in allowing the needed advancements over highly distributed services and data, when it comes to scale, heterogeneity support, and governance.

Ten Steps to Building Employee Engagement
Irene offers up some great wisdom worth chewing on. But don’t stop there. Take action. Find where you can apply some or all of these steps into your leadership. Your employees are counting on it. You have the right people on the bus, but how do you keep them engaged? Here are ten simple but powerful steps

Quote for the day:

"The person who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the one who will win." -- Roger Bannister